ANTA02 -- In search of Respect -- UTSC

In Search of Respect

ANTA02

Introduction

• -  Bourgois forced into crack
  
• -  Looking for an inexpensive apartment
  
• -  wanted to write book on the experiences of poverty and ethnic segregation in the
  heart of one of the most expensive cities in the world
  
• -  thought drug themes was one of the main things he would explore
  
• -  original subject was the entire underground licensed off-track betting and drug-
  dealing
  
• -  people didn’t know what cocaine was when he first arrived because it was not
  available as a mass-marketed product
  
• -  by the end however a lot of people knew about it
  
• -  heroin has rejoined crack and cocaine as a primary drug of choice available in the
  inner city as international suppliers of heroin have regained their lost market share of substance abuse by lowering their prices and increasing the quality of their product
  The Underground Economy
  
  • -  book not about crack or drugs
    
  • -  substance abuse is just a symbol of deeper social marginalization and alienation
    
  • -  according to the statistics burgoise’s neighbors should be dressed in rags and
    homeless
    
  • -  most local residents are adequately dressed and reasonably healthy
    
  • -  why should people take the subway downtown to work minimum wage – in
    downtown offices when they can sell drugs in their street corners in front of their
    apartment or school yard
    
  • -  because fewer households than individuals are missed by the Census in urban
    settings, one possible measure for the size of the underground economy is the
    figure got households that declare no “wage or salary income”
    
  • -  this provides only the roughest comparative measure for the size of the
    underground economy in different neighborhoods because some households
    survive exclusively on retirement
    
  • -  this figure only measures drug dealing even more tenuously since many rely on
    the untaxed economy for supplemental income
    Street Culture: Resistance and Self Destruction
    
  • -  street culture offers an alternative forum for autonomous personal dignity
    
  • -  street culture has emerged as an oppositional style
    
  • -  although street culture emerges out of a personal search for dignity and a rejection
    of racism and subjugation it ultimately becomes an active agent in personal
    degradation and community ruin
    
  • -  most El-Barrio residents have nothing to do with drugs
    

• -  the drug dealers in this book represent a small minority of East Harlem but they have managed to set the tone for public life
  
• -  street-level drug dealers offer a persuasive, even if violent and self-destructive, alternative lifestyle to the youths growing up around them
  
• -  the extreme – response to poverty and segregation that the dealers and addicts in this book represent, afford insight into processes that may be experienced in one form or another by major sectors of vulnerable population experiencing rapid structural change in the context of political and ideological oppression
  Ethnographic Methods and Negative Stereotyping
  

• -  hopes to restore the agency of culture, the autonomy of individuals, and the
  centerality of gender and the domestic sphere to a political economic understanding of the experience of persistent poverty and social marginalization of the United States
  
• -  individuals who have been marginalized socially, economically, and culturally have had negative relationships with mainstream society
  
• -  even honest citizens for example, regularly engage in underground economy practices when they finesse their deductions on income tax returns
  
• -  cultures are never good or bad, they have an internal logic. Suffering is usually hideous, it is a solvent of human integrity, and ethnographers never want to make the people they study look ugly
  Critiquing the Culture of Poverty
  

- bourgeois’s feels that it is imperative from a personal and ethical perspective, as
well as from an analytical and a theoretical one to explain the horrors that he witnessed from a personal and an ethnical perspective
Chapter 1: Violating Apartheid in the United States
- research almost came to an end when he disrespected Ray Learning Street Smarts

• -  Ray was having a good time with his friends, acquantinces and it was rare to catch him this happy
  
• -  Ray and Burgouise were close, Ray had told him about his stickup artist past, and because in the party Ray had just made a point of buying Burgoise a Heineken instead of the cheaper budwieser that everyone else received
  
• -  Burgouise thought it would be a good moment and it would impress everyone if he shared a photograph of him on the newspaper standing next to Phil Donahue following a prime-time televison debate on violent crimes in East Harlem
  
• -  He wanted to show that picture because some of Ray’s most closest men thought that he was an imposter, pretending to be a stuck up professor, and some thought he was a narcotics agent on a long-term undercover assignment
  

• -  Basically burgouise stuffed the paper into Ray’s face and told him to read the caption, and Ray can’t read
  
• -  He got very upset and swore at everyone and said he didn’t care about any of this shit
  
• -  Primo turned to him and said “you dissed the fat nigga”
  The Parameter of Violence, Power, and Generosity
  

• -  Ray had taught Primo how to steal car radios and burgalarize downtown
  businesses.
  
• -  Primo told burgoise that Ray will not be okay he is respected on the streets,
  people know him, he was wild when he was a kid .On the streets that means respect. So, Burgoise asked him if he was scared of Ray, and Primo admitted he has been scared of Ray. He told him stories of childhood terror that Ray inflicted on him.
  
• -  Ray’s ruthlessness and cruelty were an integral part of his effectiveness at running his networks and crackhouses smoothly
  
• -  Behavior that appears irrationally violent, barbaric, and ultimately self-destructive to the outsider can be reinterpreted one’s “human capital development”
  
• -  Ceaser is Primo’s best friend and he works as the lookout in the gameroom.
  
• -  Primo and Ceaser explained to Burgoise that its not good to be sweet sometimes
  to people because they are going to take advantage of you. You have to be a nice and sweet person in real life but you got to have a little meaness in you and play street. You can’t allow people to push you around because otherwise people think you’re a punk and that’s the whole point to make people believe your cool so that nobody bothers you
  
• -  After that Burgouise tried to keep a low profile, and not encounter Ray. Ray had told Primo that he had a dream that Burgouise was part of the FBI. Everyone took these symbolic warnings seriously because dreams have a powerful significance in Puerto Rican culture
  
• -  Ray’s followers did not remain loyal to him solely out of fear and violence, some of the older network members of his network genuinely liked him. He was capable of reciprocating friendship.
  The Barriers of Cultural Capital
  
  • -  Ray expected Burgoise to serve as his cultural broker to the outsider world,
    ultimately demanding that I help him launder his money
    
  • -  He wanted bugoise’s help him in all the beureaucratic hoops that kept him from
    operating as a legal entrapaneur.
    
  • -  Burguiose was careful not to offend Ray and always found excuses to avoid
    unwittingly becoming a facilitator to his money-laundering schemes, which inevitably failed miserably as soon as he encountered institutionalized bureaucracies or any kind of formal paperwork
    Confronting Race, Class, and Politics
    

- police officers would make fun of Burgoise’s accent made police officers think he was making fun of them, or putting on airs when he spoke politely to them in complete sentences. When he sounded polite he risked offending them
Racism and the Culture of Terror

• -  everyone in El-Barrio is conscious of the real possibility of assault
  
• -  Micheal Taussig’s term: “culture of terror” to convey the widespread violence on
  a vulnerable society
  
• -  Spanish Harlem is a consequence of the “culture of terror” dynamic is to silence
  the peaceful majority of the population who reside in the neighborhood. They isolate themselves from the community and grow to hate those who participate in the street culture – sometimes dynamic mandates distrust of one’s neighbor
  
• -  In order to have a successful ethnography Burgoise had to be relaxed and enjoy himself on the street.
  Internalizing Institutionalized Violence
  

- judges in Manhattan never send people to jail for the first time for selling or
buying small quantities of drugs after being arrested
Accessing the Game Room Crack House

• -  burgouise refused to sniff cocaine when he was with Primo and Benzie and they
  ended up telling him that they were thrilled to be hanging out with such good people who did not sniff. Primo always liked to conversate with Burgoise because he was an actual live representative of “drug free” live America
  
• -  burgouise started to hang out with people at the Game Room crackhouse chatting with Primo or whoever else was on duty that shift. He became an exotic object of prestige, the crackhouse habitués wanted to be seen with him. He had a power relation where his prescence intimidated people.
  
• -  Burgouise’s next step was to break through the impressions-management game playing that inverse power relationships inevitable entail
  

o Ex: within Primo he had triggered a wave of internalized racism whereby he enthusiastically presented himself as superior to the shameless scum all around us here. He kept trying to differentiate himself from those Puerto Ricans that work in factories. Primo felt that it was good for his mind to be talking to Burgouise. At the same time he still thought that Burgouise was an undercover officer. He said that I don’t care, if tomorrow you arrest me, I want to talk to you your good people. Also, 3 years later Primo started calling Burgouise “the white nigga” who always be hanging with me.
􏰀 Primo told Burgouise that when I first met you I wondered who you were, and I received you well because I thought you were good. Then Benzie told him that when I first saw you I thought you were like you know bisexual even though you had a wife and all you were dirty. It was cause of the way you talk and act, and cause you asked a lot of questions a lot of gay people are like that. But,

after Benzie and Burgouise started hanging out Benzie started to understand him but still thought he was a faggot. Then Primo said the only reason that Benzie though that way was because you were a white boy.
African – American/Puerto Rican Relations on the Streets

• -  Burgouise wanted to be black when he was younger. He wanted to be with that
  black style. Cause they are badder.
  
• -  He thought that Spanish people were kind of wimpy
  
• -  Through halfway in this book, the characters that Burgouise had developed a
  close relationship with, began following the details of his writing habits and told him to make speedier progress.
  o Ex: when Burgouise came down with a debilitating tendinitis in his wrists and forearms from spending too many hours on the word processor Ceaser and Primo became genuinely worried and disappointed. Their relationship had developed an almost psychotherapeutic dimension.
  Chapter 2: A Street History of El-Barrio
  
  • -  Puerto Rico is not a economically profitable colony, it was a locus for military control
    
  • -  Puerto Ricans are not allowed to vote in presidential elections and have no enfranchised representatives in the U.S congress but it is subject to U.S rule
    
  • -  According to Caesar: the only reason that the U.S acknowledges Puerto Rico is because its close to Cuba – a shorter distance to destroy communism – Puerto Rico has nothing to offer
    From Puerto Rico Jibaro to Hispanic Crack Dealer
    
    • -  in 1990’s the U.S actively transformed Puerto Rico’s economy, rendering it even
      less responsive to local needs and culture than it had been under Spanish
      documentation
      
    • -  New York – born Puerto Ricans are the descendants of an uprooted people in the
      midst of a marathon sprint through economic history.
      
      1. 1)  From semi-subsistence peasants on privet hillside plots or local
         haciendas
         
      2. 2)  To agriculture laborers on foreign owned, capital-intensive ego
         expert plantations
         
      3. 3)  To factory workers in an export-platform
         
      4. 4)  To sweatshop workers in ghetto tenants
         
      5. 5)  To service sector employees in high-rise inner city housing
         projects
         
      6. 6)  To underground economy entrepreneurs on the street
         

• -  Primo called his father a jibaro (stereotypical image of a ruggedly independent subsidence farmers who wears a straw hat, wields a straw machete, and squats on his country home to receive visitor at the end of a hard day’s work at the fields).
  
• -  One particular economic sector has benefited greatly from the Puerto Rico’s repeated social and economic metamorphoses: the U.S based multinational corporations who dominate its local economy. They have taken advantage of the Island’s general tax concession to turn Puerto Rico into a haven for inflated corporate profits.
  
• -  The economic imperatives shaping the lives of Puerto Ricans have been compounded ideologically by an overtly racist “cultural assault”
  

o This is symbolized by the U.S colonial administration’s English-only policy in Puerto Rican schools until 1949
o For those who emigrated from the islands culture shock has been obviously more profound. Overnight, the new immigrants whose rural- based cultural orientations and self-esteem was constructed around interpersonal webs of respect organized around complex categories of age, gender, and kinship found themselves transformed into “racially” inferior pariahs. Ever since their arrival in United States they have been humiliated with a virulence that is specific to North America’s history of polarized race relations and ethnically segmented labor markets.
o Puerto Ricans suffer disproportionate hardships that ranges from the fastest growing HIV infected cases, the highest rate of bedridden disability, the most deaths caused by the cirrhosis of the liver, and the highest rates of suicide attempts
Confronting Individual Responsibility on the Street
- When face to face to face with individuals like Ray, Primo, or Ceaser one feels
the amount of “historic apology” and “structural victimization” which exempts them from their consequences of their often violent, self destructive and parasitical actions.
Poverty and Ecological Despair

• -  Regardless of which ethnic group has prevailed in East Harlem since the 1880s,
  researchers and commentators have virtually unanimously decried the
  neighborhoods concentrated poverty, condemning it judgmentally.
  
• -  East Harlem is one of the worst districts in the city, the boys have no respect for
  learning law or discipline
  The Free Market for Crack and Cocaine
  

- although no longer powerful as it was before the old fashioned mafia the old
fashioned mafia has left a powerful institutional and ideological on East Harlem by demonstrating decisively that crime and violence pay.

o Ex: Ceaser put this into play in the gameroom, basically he says that you can only survive in this world if your connected to the dirty Italians. Also, he adds that if you r rich you still got to get dirty.
Chapter 3: Crackhouse Management: Attention, Discipline, and Dignity
Living with Crack

• -  Felix established the crackhouse, he was Primo’s first cousin. The bulk of Felix’s
  energy was devoted towards cultivating sexual liaisons with addicted women –
  especially teenage girls.
  
• -  During the early phase of the crack epidemic in the late 1985 Primo was Felix’s
  steadiest customer.
  
• -  In later years Primo would reminisce about the desperate years he spent as a crack
  

addict

• 􏰀  Primo said he was in his own world, and didn’t care about the world. Once Primo was with his “homeboy” and his girl, and they saw this Mexican sleeping in the lobby, he was probably drunk. According to Primo he looked like he had a job because otherwise he would not have had a gold ring. So, as soon as Primo saw him he asked him for the time, and as he got the time Primo grabbed him by the neck, and put his knife in his back. Then he told the homeless guy don’t move or I’ll stick you like a roasted pig. The Mexican panicked and wanted to escape more but couldn’t and the more he tried the more Primo was jigging him. Primo wasn’t joking around either he was serious. Then he put the Mexican down and started poking him hard and his homegirl started searching him. She found his chain, and then Primo said to take his ring too. But, the Mexican said take everything just not the ring please. But they still took the ring, and sold it. They left the girl in the park, she didn’t even get a cent
  
• 􏰀  Then Ceaser explained he only smokes because he loves it. Once you take the first blast, you can’t have one, you need more, because it is good.
  

• -  Felix was hanging around some women in a hotel in New Jersey. It was on the second floor and Candy – his wife –had found out about it and came looking for him. And as Felix jumped from the second floor landing he fucked up his foot, so he couldn’t work. The next day Felix asked Burgouise if he wanted to help him out. From that day Burgouise started to work there.
  
• -  Candy shot Felix to punish him for sleeping with her sister. As soon as Felix recovered from his hospital stay, he was sent ‘upstate’ to prison to serve an unrelated 2- 4 year prison sentence for weapon possession. Candy immediately sold the rights to the gameroom for $3000 to Ray, who himself had just completed a 4-year sentence upstate for assault with a deadly weapon, following his $14 000 shoot-out above the heroin den he was holding up.
  

Restructuring Management at the Game Room

• -  Ray proved to be a brilliant labor relations manager
  
• -  He extracted higher and higher profits margins from his problematic workers
  
• -  He knew how to discipline his workforce firmly without overstepping culturally
  defined rules of mutual respect. He knew exactly where to set violent limits, and when he express friendship and flexible understanding without ever revealing vulnerability
  
• -  Ray was particularly skillful in his manipulation of kinship networking to ensure the loyalty of his often addicted and violent workers. The majority of his employees were blood related kin, or were affiliated through marriage, or had been incorporated through a fictive kinship agreement
  
  • 􏰀  For example he asked Primo to be the godfather of one of his sons, thereby establishing a compadre relationship. The institution of compadrazgo is a powerful tradition in Puerto Rican culture that sacrifices solidarity and reciprocal obligations between men. In this more modern context, Ray also benefited from this contemporary street culture kinship agreement that oblige women to establish serial households with different men through their life cycles.
    
  • 􏰀  His childhood friendship with Luis was cemented as quasi-kin relationship by having fathered children with the same woman.
    Curbing Addiction and Channeling Violence
    

• -  Primo’s close friendship with Ceaser was a complicated one. Caesars drinking
  often unleased uncontrollable outburst of aggression and when he binged on crack – which was almost every time he got paid – he ended up borrowing or stealing from everyone around him. Nevertheless Caesar and Primo were un-separable.
  
• -  Caesar did an excellent job as a lookout. The only person who has disrespected the Game Room premises while Caesar was on duty was a jealous young man high on angel dust. He was carried away from the premises with a fractured skull.
  

o Basically this black man kept talking shit about how he can do whatever he wants. Caesar was calm until the man said he was going to drop dimes on them. Then Caesar took a baseball bat and smacked him. To Caesar it is the survival of the fittest.
o Another benefit that Caesar derived from his inability to control his underlying rage was a monthly social insurance check for being as he put it – “a certified nut case” which he reconfirmed occasionally by attempting to commit suicide.
o In Ray’s judgment Caesar was too out of control to be trusted and that is why he was never formally hired into the network. Ray was much more cautious then Primo about who he hired. Caesar was acutely aware of Ray’s rejected of him but nevertheless continually acquired to formal inclusions in his organization.

􏰀 Caesar said that he knew Ray didn’t pay him directly and he was subcontracted by Primo but if he goes to jail Ray will look out for him cause he likes to keep him around for security reasons.
- Benzie was the lookout that replaced Caesar who was also a crack addict, but unlike Caesar he followed Primo’s example and used his position as drug dealer as a trampoline for overcoming his crack addition by substituting it for a less virulent powder cocaine habit occasionally supplemented by heroin. Benzie was a janitor and at that time Primo offered him a job at the lookout. Benzie started using crack while working legally and not until he quit his legitimate job to work full time as a crack dealer was he able to kick his crack habit. The responsibilities if his new position as a street seller forced him to straighten out.
Minimum Wage Crack Dealers

• -  The tendency to overspend income windfalls conspicuously is universal in an
  economy that fertilizes material goods and services. Crack dealers are merely a caricaturally visible version of these otherwise very North American phenomena of rapidly of over consuming easily earned money. Their limited options for spending money constructively in the legal economy exacerbate their profligacy.
  
• -  Most street sellers like Primo are paid on a piece-rate commission basis. In other words, their take home pat is a function of how much they sell.
  
• -  Primo has good intention but they do not lead anywhere when the only legal jobs that he compete for fail to provide him with a livable wage. None of the crack dealers were explicitly conscious of the linkage between their limited options in the legal economy, their addiction to drugs, and their dependence of the crack economy for survival and personal dignity.
  Management – Labor Conflict at the Game Room
  
  • -  Ray instituted a double shit at the Social Club, keeping it open for 16 hours every
    day except Sunday. Ray expanded the Social Club and made it better, which led to expansion and diversification of Ray’s network allowed him to be more manipulative in his management of labor relations. This initiated a protracted jiggle for power between Ray and Primo. Primo was demoted from manager to senior salesperson. Ray claimed that Primo had precipitated the changes because of the tardiness, absenteeism, and ineffectiveness in curbing violence and noise at the Game Room. Tony was hired which limited Primo to working two night shifts per week.
    o Primo responded by increasing his alcohol and substance abuse, became less punctual, and a more undisciplined worker provoking Ray on several occasions to lay him off in retaliation for probationary two-week stretches.
    
  • -  Ceasar and Ray got into many arguments when Caesar was drunk which led Ray to ask Primo to fire Caesar, Primo refused. Ray retaliated by switching Primo’s schedule to Monday and Tuesday nights instead of Thursday and Friday nights. Thursday is an especially coveted night to sell on because it is payday for municipal employees.
    

- Classic example of internalization of labor markets antagonisms
􏰀 Primo and Caesar redoubled their hatred for Tony, the replacement employee that Ray had hired a few months back to discipline Caesar and Primo. Tony reciprocated their antagonism. This escalated into a potentially lethal confrontation when 3 bundles of crack disappeared inside the Pac-Man video machine during the interval between Primo’s Tuesday night shift and Tony’s Wednesday shift. Everyone professed innocence, but there was no sign of forced entry and Tony and Primo were the only two people besides Ray to have keys to the locale. Ray wanted to kill or at least break the legs of the culprit – but he couldn’t decide who to punish. The following night another 3 bundles were stolen from the stash. Ray was furious but also helpless – a condition which made him even more dangerous than he normally is. To save face he began deducting the value of the stolen bundles from both Primo and Tony’s wages on a fifty-fifty basis. Sales on Monday and Tuesday nights were so low Ray had to set up an installment plan for his
reimbursement.
o Sensing that he was a prime suspect Caesar was very vocal in
denouncing Tony as the thief. The mysterious disappearance of the 6 bindles was finally resolved with the anticipated life threatening beating, but neither Tony, Caesar was the victims. The thief was Gato, Ray’s jack-of-all-trades maintenance worker who had renovated the new locale upstairs from the Game Room.
The Crackhouse Clique: Dealing with Security

• -  When Primo was on duty he was generous always offering beers, and even
  occaisional sniffs of cocaine.
  
• -  The people reclining on car hoods, squatting in neighboring stoops, or tapping
  their feet to the ubiquitous rap or salsa playing on someone’s radio, served several different useful roles for the crackhouse
  􏰀 Provided strategic business information on competing drug spots and on the changing trends in tastes and market shifts in the underground economy
  
• -  Primo’s best and cheapest insurance against physical assault was to surround himself with a network of people who genuinely respected and liked him.
  
• -  Another crucial service fulfilled by Primo’s hang-out network as well as his lookouts was to screen for narcotics agents. Crack dealers have to have organic ties to the street scene in order to identify the bona fide addict or user from the undercover imposter. When Primo did not know somebody or had suspicions about a customer he would check with his lookout, or a friend outside of the stoop before serving them
  
• -  The biggest threat to the Social Club came from the New York City fire marshals, who sealed the place on several occasions for violating the fire codes.
  

- The invulnerability of Ray’s crackhouse to police control was largely owing to the general public sector breakdown of the neighborhood. Inner-city police forces are so demoralized. Inner-city police forces are so demoralized and incompetent that for the most part they do not have to be systematically corrupt – although they often are – in order for the street-level for the drug dealing to flourish in their precincts. The attitude of honest officers is too hostile toward the local community for them to be able to build the networks that would allow them to document the operations of the numerous drug-delaying spots in the neighborhoods they patrol.
􏰀 For example: about 5 1⁄2 years of being practically the only white person out on the street after dark on a regular basis Burgousis’s block, which hosted almost half a dozen drug selling spots, the police never learned to recognize him. Even after he started attending their community outreach meetings for combating drugs, the police failed to recognize Burgouise on the street.
Chapter 4: “Goin Legit”: Disrespect and Resistance at Work

• -  Most of them enter the labor market when they are young.
  
• -  The problem is that from the 1950s to the 1980s second-generation inner city Puerto
  Ricans were trapped in the most vulnerable niche of a factory-based economy that was rapidly being replaced by service industries. Between 1950 and 1990 the proportion of factory jobs decreased approximately three folds at the same time as the service sector jobs doubled.
  Resistance, Laziness, and Self-Destruction
  

• -  Poverty remains the only constant as they alternate between street level crack dealing
  and just-above-minimum wage level employment. The working jobs they find are the
  least desirable in U.S society.
  
• -  They were usually fired from these jobs, but they treated their return to the world of
  street dealing as a triumph of free will and resistance on their part.
  
• -  Primo admits the only reason he doesn’t have a proper job is because he is lazy. He
  says that basically he’s going to be at “bullshit job” and nothing better will come
  along because he’ll be working 24/7 at that job.
  
• -  Caesar says what screwed him over when he was working was the fact that he was
  using crack. Caesar admits the money he makes in the Games Room is for his personal drug-addiction and self-destruction. It’s something only he could control, and no one can tell him what to do with it. And as for getting food he says that his woman takes care of the food cause she got, welfare and food stamps.
  First Fired – Last Hired
  

- Bourgoise watched Primo struggle with glimmering realization of his profound
economic vulnerability when one of his episodic attempts to reenter the legal

economy which coincided with the depression of the recession that afflicted the U.S
economy from the late 1989 through 1991.
- When a half dozen employers refused to hire him, Primo was able to blame his
inability to find a job on his employment counselor. He defiantly “fired” his counselor. After a month of continuous rejections Primo’s substance abuse increased. The dramatic deterioration in 1990 of the number of jobs available in the entry-level legal labor market caught Primo by surprise. Not only did the recession make it hard to find jobs, but Primo also had to confront his life-cycle developmental constraints. Now that Primo was in his late twenties he had a list of places where he was not hired. Primo internalized his structural marginalization. He panicked and spiraled into a psychological depression
Internalizing Employment
- Over the next few months Primo’s main strategy was to keep from facing the fact that
he was locked out of the legal labor market. He escalated his alcohol and narcotics use, and lashed out at the only person he had control over, his girlfriend Maria. He lectured her righteously.
o For example: when she lost her job at Wendy’s somehow he managed to invert the traditional gender roles of who should be gainfully employed in a household, even when retaining the patriarch’s prerogative of imposing family discipline.
Crossover Dreams
- Caesar also fantasized about going legit when opportunities presented them in
contexts that were not completely anathema to the norms of the street culture.
o For example: when Ray made his first attempt to launder his crack profits by purchasing the lease on a bodega, Caesar jumped on the opportunity to
work there. It was the perfect transition for 2 crack dealers to ease into legal employment. Not only would they maintain the same boss but also remain in the same neighborhood vicinity. Caesar’s and Ray’s enthusiasm over the imminent metamorphosis to legality once again expressed itself semantically in the internalization of the polite superstitions of their parents jibaro past.
Getting “Dissed” In The Office

• -  Primo talks about how he had a prejudiced boss. She would talk about him to
  whoever was over visiting in the office and would tell those people that Primo is illiterate. So, one day Primo decided to look up the word illiterate in the dictionary and said that she was calling him dumb or something. It wasn’t that Primo cared about being called dumb its that he had to look it up in the dictionary the words used to insult him. In contrast, in the underground economy Primo has never had to risk this kind of threat to his self-worth.
  
• -  Primo was both unwilling to and unable to comprise his street identity to imitate the professional modes of interaction that might have earned him the approval and
  

respect of the boss. It is precisely in moments like this one can witness institutionalized racism at work in how the professional service sector unconsciously imposes the requisites of Anglo middle-class cultural capital. His boss forbade him to answer the telephone because objectively a Puerto Rican street accent will discourage prospective clients and cause her to lose money.
The Gender Diss
- the machismo of street culture exacerbates the sense of insult experienced by men
because the majority of office supervisors at the entry level are women. Ultimately the gender disses respond to economic power hierarchies. The crack dealers’ experience of powerlessness is usually experienced in a racist and sexism idiom.
Work Site Wars
- Relationships with supervisors and bosses do not have to be malicious to be
humiliating or otherwise intolerable by street culture standards. One of Primo’s employers wanted Primo to go back to go back to school she was well intentioned and objectively accurate but that is not how Primo saw it. Primo saw it as he wanted to work and did not want to go to school. He saw it as he wanted things in this world and nobody should tell him what to do. At that time Primo was 18 and, had a son, and he wanted to live his life and thought that the degree would take too long.
“Fly Clothes” and Symbolic Power

• -  the entire foundation of culture and the unwillingness of people like Primo or Caesar
  to compromise their street identity is a refusal to accept marginalization in the
  mainstream professional world.
  
• -  The oppositional identities of street culture are both a triumphtum rejection of social
  marginalization, and a defensive – in some cases terrorized – denial of vulnerability. The ways office dress codes become polarized provide insight into this complex dynamic because clothing is a concretely visible area encapsulating symbolic, or cultural, conflict.
  
• -  The oppositional meaning of subcultural style among youths and marginalized sectors of society has long fascinated sociologists. Much of that material romanticizes and exoticizes the real pain of social marginalization. In contrast, if it is seen through the eyes of mainstream America, an inner-city youth’s preoccupation with “fly clothes” only confirm a stereotype of immaturity, petty irrationality, or even personal pathology.
  
• -  When young inner city men and women are forced to submit to powerful white women in the entry levels of the office-worker labor force, physical appearance becomes a fierce arena for enforcing or contesting power. Of course on a more general level this happens when the crack dealers or anyone engrossed in street culture venture into the middle-class white that dominates most public space beyond inner-city confines.
  

􏰀 Example: Caesar highlights this when he tension in his angry reminiscence of office workplace confrontations. He had no idea

when his clothes would elicit ridicule or anger. His vulnerability and powerlessness outside the street context is clearly expressed in his anger over the “flexible” job description in his FIRE service sector position. He mediates his objective powerlessness at work, through his preoccupation with the confusing office dress code.

• -  Bourgois opened up a job training program and convinced everyone in the Social Club to attend. The first to drop out was Primo. At first he did not want to talk about it, but eventually he told Bourgois his deep sense of shame and vulnerability he experienced whenever he attempted to venture into the legal labor market. It was clothes, appearance, and style that were the specific medium for resisting the humiliation of submission to a menial position in the service labor market. Primo was ashamed about the way he dressed and thought he would stand out if he went into a program where he was supposed to get help to get a job and everyone would be dressed well except for him.
  
• -  But obviously the problem is more than just the clothes, racism and other subtle badges of symbolic power are expressed through wardrobes and body language. Ultimately, Primo had no idea what clothes would be appropriate in the professional services sector.
  The New-Immigrant Alternative
  

- Primo really wanted to find a union job. For two months he had found a unionized
position with a nighttime janitorial services company that cleaned hotel conference rooms in and theaters in Times Square. He started off at $6.50 an hour and was content. He disliked his Jewish boss for berating them everytime he inspected their work, but he was impressed by the unionized workers on his shift who militantly cursed the “bald white guy” back. After 2 weeks of qualifying for union tenture he was laid off.
The Bicultural Alternative: Upward Mobility or Betrayal

• -  The primary hope for upward mobility among New York born Puerto Ricans lies in
  expanding FIRE sector’s need for office support workers. It is one of the fastest growing subsectors of the city’s economy, it also has the greatest potential for upward mobility as people get promotions.
  
• -  One of Caesar’s older cousins who made it into the legal economy, he maintained a stable white collar job in an insurance agency and had moved his family to the suburbs. At first Caesar’s cousin told Bourgois that in order to escape from street culture he had not necessitated any ethnic compromises. He saw it as part of a religious conversion, he was a Jehovah’s Witnesses. At the same time he did admit he had to hide the extent to his economic success when he returned to his family and friends in El Barrio.
  Chapter 5: School Days: Learning to be a Better Criminal
  

• -  focus on the quintessential early-socializing institution of mainstream society in the inner city: the public school
  
• -  this leads fluidly into street culture’s alternative to school Kindergarten Delinquencies: Confronting Cultural Capital
  

• -  most elementary school teachers assert that up through second grade the majority of their students desperately want to please their teachers, even when they prone to acting out their personal problems in the classroom
  
• -  Primo and Caesar’s very first school memories are negative
  
• -  Primo never did homework he hated it
  
• -  Primo was an immigrant and this was institutionalized alienation. The inability of
  Primo’s mother to speak English and her limited literacy skills were a recipe for institutional disastere in her very first opening-day interactions with her kindergarten child’s homeroom teacher. In his class, Primo inherited instantaneous onus of his mother’s former rural plantation worker, and now new- immigrant inner-city sweatshop employee. Perhaps he had to right away protect himself by resisting his teachers lest trying to please them – and inevitably failing.
  

􏰀 Cultural Production Theory: document the way teachers unconsciously process subliminal class and cultural messages to heirarchize their students. Tangible markers like accent, clothing combine with subtler forms of expression such as eye contact, body language, play styles, and attention spans to persuade the agents in the mainstream, middle class white-dominated bureaucracy that a particular child has a disciplinary problem, emotionally disturbed, or of low intelligence. Example: By grade 2 Primo would do nothing in class he would just sit there and sometimes draw graffiti all over the desks, but when the city wide tests would come he would pass them

• -  Exclusionary Power of Cultural Capital: for example: the inability of Ray, the semiliterate head of the franchise of crack houses that Bourgois frequented, to obtain a driver’s license, or more important, Primo, Cesar, or Leroy’s experiences of disrespect in high-rise office corridors – but it is in school that the full force of middle class society’s definition of appropriate cultural capital and symbolic violence comes crashing down on a working class Puerto Rican child. Were subverted.
  
• -  The enforcement at school of the symbolic parameters of social power is an unconscious process for everyone involved.
  

o Example: when Primo achieved minimal literacy and an understanding of grade school conventions, he was able to manipulate the system against his mother and betray her trust. The normal channels of mother-child authority. She lashed back at him helplessly with beatings, anger, and distrust.

• -  Primo’s elementary school resistance escalated truancy, petty crime, and substance abuse as he reached pubescence. His mother tried to save her son by sending him to live with her parents in Arroyo, the same Puerto Rican plantation community where she had grown up.
  
• -  Primo discovered that he straddled 2 cultures – both of which rejected him. Rural Puerto Rico confronted him with the classic uprooting experience faced by the adolescent children of immigrants whose dreams of upward mobility and full citizenship have been crushed in segregated cities.
  Violence: Family and Institutional
  

- Caesar is the son of a women who immigrated as a teenager came from a
shantytown and was literate and acculturated. She had violent disruptions in her life like serial teenage pregnancies with different men, heroin addiction, petty crime, and eventually murder and incarceration. Hence the personal and institutional discontinuities and hostilities is Caesar’s life.
o Caesar’s mom had him when she was 16, and his dad was 20. His mom used to sniff coke and dope, and drink. Caesar was not dumb in school he was violent, the only reason he came out wild was because he had no guidance. He was the oldest in his family. His mother couldn’t take care of him because she was taking care of his little brother and little sister and so he was left with his grandmother. Caesar’s mother was a “wild bitch and treated Caesar like shit” according to Primo and she killed a doctor, that was premeditated murder. According to Primo it was some doctor who was writing scripts for her that she was fucking.
􏰀 Caesar claims the repeated move he made with his grandmother from one extended family member to another were the precipitating factors for his dropping out of school at an early age. Caesar changed a lot of schools before dropping out. He used to fight a lot so that no one would bother him. Even if he lost, he started fights.

• -  Caesar does acknowledge his ultimate vulnerability in the institutional setting o Caesar says that his only problem was when he was sent to a reform
  school upstate. All kids would get beat down by the counselors. He says he used to get beat up by the other kids as well. According to him it was one of those schools where you had to fight to survive.
  
• -  Caesar pours out his classic battered-child rationalization and denials of his early childhood abuse:
  

o Caesar’s grandmother never hit him nor did his mother. That was because Caesar wouldn’t do anything around her he was too scared of her. He had seen his mother get into a couple of fights when he was little and that made him nervous a couple of times. One time Caesar saw his mother throw out these black ladies that had attacked her through a store window. After that Caesar was scared of her.

Learning Street Skills in Middle School
- Caesar was called “emotionally disturbed” because his violence was a little wild,
so they put him in Special Ed. That is what basically initiated his dependence on social security insurance. One day Caesar got high and his science teacher kept annoying him so he took the scissors and grabbed his tie and cut his shirt. Then the principal asked him why he did it and he told him that he was hearing voices and they put him on Thorazine. He was on Ward’s Island for special education, that’s where all the lunatics were kept. That last for 3 years.
The Peer Group

• -  When asked about how they ended up on the street most of the dealers blamed
  there peer groups. One of the messages to come out of my schoolyard conversations with Caesar and Primo was that they spent no time in class. They learned a lot during their school days – but none of it was academic. Most important, they spent their time cultivating street identities both inside and outside the physical confines of school.
  
• -  Car thieving was a memorable rite of passage into teenage hood for an enterprising youngster. It also offered a modicum of revenge against the rich white neighborhood hemming and tantalizing El Barrio as its Southern border on East 96th Street.
  Adolescent Gang Rape
  

• -  Bourgois remembers vividly the first night Primo told him that Ray and Luis
  organize gang rapes in the abandoned building where the Social Club crack house was located. It made Bourgois disgusted with his “friends” about the bonding and sexual celebration of Primo’s brutal accounts. It was gang rape 1 girl and about 5 guys. The girl was only 17 years old. Each one of the men would take their chance with her.
  
• -  Primo and Caesar gave Bourgois dozens of accounts and versions of their direct participation in sexual violence during their earliest adolescent years. Few people talk about rape, neither the predators nor the victims. As a man Bourgois worries about the “politics of representation”.
  
• -  From a political perspective Bourgois was worried about creating a forum for a public humiliation of the poor and powerless. Many people would interpret these as passages as some kind of a reflection on the Puerto Rican community.
  Chapter 6: Redrawing The Gender Line on The Street
  Witnessing Patriarchy in Crisis
  

- males are not accepting the new rights and roles that women are obtaining;
instead they are desperately attempt to reassert their grandfathers’ lost autocratic control over their households and over public space. Of course, this does not in any way imply that women in El Barrio, or anywhere else on earth, have provoked male violence against themselves because of their demands for greater rights.

• -  In the Puerto Rican case, the change in power relations between men and women conflates with a structurally induced wrenching of traditional roles as men steeped in jibaro rural identities confront unemployment and social marginalization in the postindustrial, urban United States. The traditional “Spanish ideal” of a large, male dominated household blessed with numerous children is recognized was an anachronism by even the most reactionary men and women of the new generation born in New York City.
  
• -  The male head of household who, in the worst case scenario, had become an impotent, economic failure experiences these rapid historical structural transformations as a dramatic assault on his sense of masculine dignity.
  Domestic Violence in Postindustrial Turmoil
  
  • -  Candy wants to have 12 children. Candy was a child abused daughter. She left
    home because her father used to beat her and lived on the streets. Candy got raped by Felix when she was 13 and became pregnant. Candy had her daughter but she was taken away from her because Candy was a minor. Then her husband at the age of 14 tried to marry her but the court said you too young, your 2 kids, you don’t know what you want. Candy says her husband was like her father, he abused her. She says she loved getting beat up cause she was used to getting beaten up from 0 -13 and then her husband was doing it from 13 – 32 She used to look for fights for him beat her up. Candy has been trying to commit suicide since she was 11. Last time Candy succeeded when she was 33. Felix’s extreme brutality against Candy, especially during her pregnancy, emerges as an almost caricultural expression of this structural maladjustment, rather than being merely the isolated excesses of a psychopath
    
  • -  Felix used to beat Candy so much she lost 5 pregnancies. Candy wanted 12 kids only got 5.
    
  • -  When Candy finally shot Felix in the stomach about a month after her first tentatively polite conversations with her in front of the Game Room everyone supported her. Candy understood her liberating act as the traditional outburst of a jealous woman who was uncontrollably romantically in love with an unfaithful man. She was desperately holding on to the traditional family values of the past where gender confrontations and assertions of individual rights express themselves in the romantic idioms of sexual jealousy. She had always been aware that Felix “had outside women out there” but when he violated the rules of kinship solidarity she finally exhausted her battered-woman’s dependence on her.
    
  • -  One day Candy went to her mother’s house to see where Felix was at. While they were talking outside, she saw he had lipstick on his mouth, and she found out he was fooling around with another woman – with her, her sister, and another woman. Then Candy took out her gun and shot him. But then while she was walking away he said “I love you” and Candy has a heart of gold, and she came back. She got him an ambulance, and got rid of the gun. They told the police it was a holdup.
    

Recovery: Sex, Drugs, and More Romantic Love

• -  Candy gave birth to another child after Felix was in jail, and fell into a deep
  depression and an economic crisis. Candy pulled herself out of the depression by madly falling in love with Primo and by getting a job selling drugs for Ray. People started respecting Candy because she had shot her husband, and no one wanted to mess with her. Candy sniffed more coke, lost more weight, saw less of her children, made more money, had more sex and power than ever before in her life.
  
• -  Candy even advised the wife of Felix’s older brother, Luis, to shoot her husband for beating her up every time she moved the curtains to look out the window of their eighth-floor project apartment.
  
• -  On a deeper level, Candy never escaped her abusive husband’s control. She was following in his footsteps: selling drugs, neglecting her children, and flaunting her sexual conquests. Primo admitted her was creating a Frankenstein: a formerly battered mother of 5 children who was out-machoing all the men in her life.
  
• -  Primo could not accept the reverse gender roles. Candy was bragging publicly about her sexual exploits, much the same as Felix had done by parading his girlfriend in front of the Game Room before being shot.
  
• -  After about 6 months, Primo finally rebelled against Candy’s inversion of patriarchy. He struggles to recoup his personal sense of male respect by the only means immediate at his disposal: physical violence. Classically, their breakup was precipitated by his unwillingness to meet Candy’s demands for sex.
  
• -  To get revenge on Primo Candy would proclaim how much she loved having sex with him. This eventually led to blows she chanced upon Primo while he was accompanied by his new girlfriend whom he had gone to after breaking up with Candy.
  Contradictory Contexts for Women’s Struggles
  
  • -  U.S policy toward the poor has always been obsessed with distinguishing the
    “worthy” from the “unworthy” poor, and of blaming individuals for their failings.
    
  • -  Candy offers a good example of how mothers actively have to manipulate hostile
    governments to keep their children and themselves sheltered, fed, and out of prison. The Welfare Department and the penal system have been the most salient state institutions affecting the stability of the family. To fulfill the job as a mother and nurturing her children she felt that she had a choice between selling drugs, collecting welfare, and working at legal jobs. She event kept a second, “clean” social security number to register her legal earnings with the Internal Revenue System without jeopardizing her welfare and medical entitlements.
    The Internalizating of Institutional Constraints
    

- Candy didn’t get enough welfare, for her or her baby because of a mix-up with
social security papers. She admits its very hard for her to find a job. She tells Bourgois look at a parent like me who is not into drugs; love their kids like

babies; have them in Catholic school; want the best for them – what we do
sometimes, they make parents like Candy do.
- Candy got caught and had to go to jail. Ray paid her bail.
Mothers in Jail
- Candy had to go to court and at her first hearing the judge almost ruled Candy to
be in contempt of court because of her clothing. It was a clash over their different class and cultural interpretations of how a contrite mother should dress in a formal public setting. She had arrived wearing a skintight blood-red jumpsuit. She had borrowed money to buy the suit for that occasion. Candy thought she was showing respect to the judge by “dressing sharp” and her feelings were hurt. She immediately sexualized the judge’s remonstrations, interpreting them to be jealous expressions of an older, less attractive woman.
Chapter 7: Families and Children in Pain
Street Cultures Children

• -  Candy’s son junior was the first boy who Bourgois watched graduate into crack
  dealer status. When Burgouis first asked him at 13 what he wanted to be when he grew up he answered that he wanted to have “cars, girls, and gold chains — but no drugs; money, and rings on all his fingers
  
• -  He didn’t realize he was being sucked into this world of drugs.
  In Search of Meaning: Having Babies in El Barrio
  

- Women in El Barrio loved to become pregnant because it offered a romantic
escape from their objectivity difficult surroundings.
o Example: Maria Primo’s girlfriend became pregnant and it was the
happiest Bourgois had seen her. Maria started writing poetry to celebrate her relationship with Primo and their future progeny. Primo in contrast was anxious and angry at Maria. He begged her to have an abortion and abused her verbally. It represented her most realistic chance of establishlishing an independent household given the extraordinary scarcity of affordable, subsidized public housing in New York City.
The Demoralization of Mothers and Crack

• -  Candy went back to defining her life around the needs of her children.
  
• -  One of the recurrent criticisms was that Candy needed a strong male figure to
  discipline her
  Chapter 8: Vulnerable Fathers
  

- too many abusive fathers are present in nuclear households terrorizing children and mothers

• -  if anything women take too long to become single mothers once they have babies. They often tolerate inordinate amounts of abuse.
  
• -  An idealized jibaro identity continues to permeate, or at least resonate with bits and pieces of a street culture that rejects its marginalization by the centers of power in U.S. society. It offers an appositionally based sense of dignity and respect.
  Masculinity in Historical Crisis
  
  • -  Masculinity respect centers on having large families and taking full responsibility
    of supporting them economically. Ray had multiple children with many women. The inconsistency of their failures to support these children was covered by denial and hypocrisy, which usually involves condemning the mothers of their abandoned children for transgressions that made them worthy to receive their support.
    
  • -  All the men marveled at how many babies he had sired. A man with such diversely scattered progeny and such obvious business acumen commanded respect.